Religious beliefs have always been used for political purposes. In Mexico Don Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla took a flag with Virgin Guadalupe, and many Mexicans with no Spanish blood joined him. Hidalgo was born in Mexico from Spanish parents.

Now we can read in the NYT that two American citizens have been killed in Kabul, Afghanistan, because of an error on the part of the US, the burning of the Qoran, for which even the President of the United States has apologized. The Taliban claimed responsibility of the crime against the Americans, and there has been anti US demonstrations for almost a week.

Should the US and her allies from Northern Europe leave?

Yes, I think they should, but leaving enough infrastructure to avoid another attack from successors of the 9/11 criminal Bin Laden.

A few American Navy Seals were enough to get rid of him. At the face of it, NATO should leave, Mission Accomplished.

No one can blame the Latinos feel alone or feel they live in a nation within a nation. Both the Democratic and Republican party have failed in their attempt to understand and connect with us. There are 12 million Hispanic voters looking for a candidate to represent them but so far have not found it.

President Barack Obama broke an important and symbolic campaign promise. And it seems that Republicans are making an extra effort to lose the Hispanic vote. If Republicans can not get at least 33 percent of the Hispanic vote, they will not regain the presidency. Since Ronald Reagan, all the Republican candidates who received more than a third of the Latino vote won their election. And all the polls suggest that Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich could not be close to those figures for November.

The Republicans are on track to lose the presidential election because they have rejected all reasonable proposals to solve the problem of illegal immigration. For the first time in a generation, Republicans have a presidential candidate that does not support a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Reagan, Bush, father and son, and McCain supported a legalization plan. But the current rejection of the Republicans to even consider immigration reform and the Dream Act for students is the perfect formula for losing the constituency of the fastest growing in America.

Despite this, the immigration issue is not the most important for Latinos, according to polls. They are more concerned about getting a good job, schools for their children and access to doctors and hospitals. But we must recognize that the issue of undocumented immigrants is very, very personal to us. It is a symbol.

If you attack the undocumented, we're attacking everyone. They are our neighbors and co-workers, their children go to school with our children and fight in wars for us, taking jobs nobody else wants, pay taxes and generally make America a better country.

But let's start with the basics.

To begin with do not call them "illegal." No human being is "illegal" and it shows a lot of hypocrisy and double standards. Nobody called "illegal" U.S. companies that hire illegal immigrants. Words matter. We must care for them.

Second, no one believes the speeches of the Republicans of the need to further secure the border with Mexico. The number of illegal immigrants fell from 12 to 11 million according to the Pew Hispanic Center. The towns along the border with Mexico are among the safest in the nation. And the idea of ​​a wall is absurd. What do you want walls for, when as high as four in 10 illegal immigrants arriving by air, overstay their visa?

Third. If your plan is to make the United States as a repressive and inhospitable to immigrants-such as new anti-immigration laws have made Alabama and Arizona, forget about the Latino vote.

The Republicans are missing a historic opportunity to regain the Hispanic vote. Latinos are very disappointed with President Barack Obama because he broke a major campaign promise. "What I can guarantee is that we in the first year will have an immigration bill that I can strongly support," he told me in an interview in Denver on May 28, 2008. But he broke his promise. Latinos called "The promise of Obama." Not kept his word.

Moreover, the Obama administration is responsible for the separation of thousands of Hispanic families whose children are U.S. citizens. Obama has deported more immigrants, more than 1.2 million-than any other president in history. And although lately their immigration policies have focused on deporting criminals, the Safe Communities program has adversely affected many innocent workers who have not committed any crime.

"Latinos," Ronald Reagan said, "are Republicans but still do not know." In fact, Latinos share many things with Republicans: they oppose abortion, are suspicious of governments that abuse their power and have very religious family values ​​and are traditional. The Republicans could have used these similarities to the Latinos - and attack the contradictory Barack Obama's immigration policy, to create a new alliance with Hispanics. But they did not. They threw it all away.

Latinos do no have the political representation that they deserve. We should have at least 15 senators and yet, we only have two. But with a population of more than 50 million, growing at huge rates, we will soon have our own Hispanic president.

It was assumed that 2012 would be a year of hope for Hispanics. Not so. We have to choose between a president who failed us and did not keep his word, and a Republican candidate, whoever he is, that does not understand us.

Jorge Ramos is the host of Noticiero Univision, has won several Emmy awards, and is the author of 11 books, including Earth and All Dying to Cross.

Greece is going down the drain. People are going hungry. Portuguese young are asked to go to Brazil, I guess Italian and Spanish kids, are checking with their American friends. But you know what? Do not go to Mexico; gangs are running the place. This week the Zetas left jail after killing their enemies inside the jail!

Monday, February 20, 2012

FREMONT, Calif. — In a brand-new factory here, Eric Kim, chief executive of Soraa Inc., cradles a palm-size light that he refers to as “LED 2.0.” The light has a circular snowflakelike cooling frame surrounding a lens that emits a bright white light.

But it also radiates a mystery — and a continuing controversy.

Over the past few years, energy-saving LED lights have popped up nearly every place where low power is required. They provide the backlighting for cellphones, smartphones and laptops as well as for headlamps for hikers, for instance.

But in the United States in particular, LED lights have not yet caught on for home lighting, still a bastion of the incandescent light bulb — which to this day is not much more efficient than when it was invented by Thomas Edison in 1879.

The problem is what’s called efficiency droop. LEDs function most efficiently at low currents. Turn the current up to levels needed for room lighting, and the efficiency falls off markedly. The lights don’t dim, but as you turn up the amount of electricity, you don’t get more light, so the efficiency goes down, a problem that has made it impossible for LED bulbs to be as cost-effective as incandescent or fluorescent home lighting.

“The efficiency droop is one of the most severe and most interesting problems and controversies in science and engineering,” said E. Fred Schubert, a professor of electrical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

“Considering that LEDs are the winning future in lighting,” he added, it’s important “for industry and society that the efficiency droop be understood and solved.”

Modern LEDs — or light-emitting diodes — are semiconductor chips that produce light when electrified. LEDs typically use less than 20 percent of the energy required by comparable incandescent lights and only a little more than half the energy required by compact fluorescents.

The diodes allow current to flow easily in one direction. Charge-carriers — electrons — pass through a junction within the chip, and when an electron meets a hole, it drops to a lower energy level, in the process emitting energy in the form of a photon — light.

Most of the time, that is. But not always. And explaining why a photon is emitted in some cases, but not in others, is a persistent theoretical debate among physicists and electrical engineers. The question is: What causes the photon not to be released and causes the droop?

That is exactly what physicists don’t agree on.

Announcements this month by Cree, one of the major makers of LEDs in the United States and by Soraa, a start-up here making next-generation LEDs, indicate that significant progress continues to be made in efficiency — and in avoiding droop.

The high brightness blue LED, the kind used today but too expensive for extensive use, was invented in 1993 by Shuji Nakamura, a Japanese physicist who is one of the founders of Soraa.

This month, the firm claimed a breakthrough in circumventing LED droop. However, it is keeping the details of its new technology proprietary.

Despite Soraa’s secrecy, last April a group of researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where Dr. Nakamura took a faculty position after leaving Japan in 1999 and where two of his co-founders, Steve DenBaars and Jim Speck, also teach, published a research report indicating that they had found evidence that LED droop could be explained by a process known as Auger recombination. The Auger effect was first discovered in 1922 by two European physicists, and it describes a subatomic process in which an electron displaces another electron but does not emit light.

Still, the debate has not been put to rest. Late last year, two other groups put forward competing theories that suggest that Auger recombination plays little or no part in efficiency droop.

Other theories suggest a process called carrier leakage, in which at high currents the carriers start to spill away from areas of high performance, or another process, called carrier delocalization, where electrons simply fail to find a paired hole at high electric currents because they are pulled away from the active region where electrons and holes are supposed to recombine and emit light.

Soraa’s chief technology officer is Mike Krames, an electrical engineer, who while at a previous company, Lumileds, was one of the pioneers of the Auger recombination theory.

“For me the only model that is consistent with all of the experimental data is Auger recombination,” he said.

One scientist who is familiar with the company’s technology said that Soraa’s advantage comes from changing the orientation of the quantum well where the interactions that generate luminescence take place. Strong electrical fields that form along the plane of the crystal structure interfere with the process that typically generates photons. By tilting the structure out of that plane, it is possible to minimize the droop effect, he said.

From Dr. Krames’s perspective, the battle between the theorists may not be over, but the war has been won.

“The debate goes on in other people’s heads, but it doesn’t go on in mine,” he said. “It doesn’t change the fact that all the evidence points in this direction, which leads to a strategy which we’ve adopted, which leads to better devices.”